Mistwalker’s First iOS Game, Party Wave, Will Cost $1.99

On Twitter, The Last Story creator Hironobu Sakaguchi announced that he finished work on his first iOS game, Party Wave. No, it’s not a role playing game, it’s a surfing title inspired by one of Sakaguchi’s hobbies.

Mistwalker submitted Party Wave to Apple so it’s up to them to review the game, which Sakaguchi says might be done in ten days. When it’s ready, Party Wave will cost $1.99. It’s designed as a universal app so it’ll work on your iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

Between surfing, photography and LEGOs, making video games looks like his hobby.

Aoshi00

Yeah, the Gooch lives in Hawaii and is quite an avid surfer, so pretty cool he gets to make a game about his hobby. Would definitely get this if I ever get an Wi-Fi iPad 3 using my phone’s 4G or something.. now I’m even interested in their next 2 iOS games :)

http://www.cubiz.tk/ Auragar

It’s an iOS game none are even worth the $.99 people like to charge. This is $1.99 for what reason?

Paradox me

Because, luckily for developers, your hangups don’t dictate the price of software that people have put their time, talent and money into.

Many console games were less complex than this some 25 years ago and retailed for ~20 times the cost. A buck or two is very reasonable.

FitzpatrickPhillips

Is there any reasons why devs almost always go for iOS and never Android? Besides every and their mothers having an apple device that is.

You’d think they’d develop for both.

riceisnice

Maybe if it was 39.99$

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000147755574 Marcos Karal

If I remember correctly, you don’t really need to pay for a DevKit, or paying for publishing your game. Just having a Mac would do.

OneOkami

You have to pay for a developer license and you have to sign a contract that allows Apple to keep 30% of the sales.

PoweredByHentai

If you have a Mac, then yes, developing for the iOS is free, but you’re basically stuck on Objective-C, which can be a real pain in the arse as a programming language.

If you don’t have a Mac, then you have your choice of poison:
1. Pay Apple 99 bucks a year for a license to their iOS SDK
2. Use PhoneGap (you may need the Nomad plugin for Visual Studios)
3. Use Unity 3D
4. JQuery Mobile

And so on.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000147755574 Marcos Karal

Hm… That makes sense

Thank you guys

Locklear93

The Android game market has a few problems that Apple doesn’t, but the short answer is: There’s a lot less profit in the Android market.

The longer answer is a mix of factors. Market fragmentation is one. With iOS, there are a relatively small number of different handsets, and they can upgrade their phone OS for quite a long time. I imagine at some point Apple has a cutoff where they just say, “We’re not updating the original iPhone anymore,” but for a while at least, anyone with an iPhone can update the phone. That gives iOS developers a more console like environment, with similar hardware and OS to work with. Android developers have to worry about a lot more. Will my game work on an HTC G2? Original Droid? Droid Incredible? Sprint Evo? Different phones have different processors, different resolutions, different screen sizes–and most phone carriers are REALLY horrible about updating the phone OS. My HTC G2 is running 2.3. The current version of Android is 4.1. It makes releasing an Android game everyone can use much more difficult.

The next problem I only have anecdotal evidence on at the moment, but it’s my recollection that Android owners are much less likely to actually BUY a game for the phone than iOS owners. While Android is currently the most widely used smartphone OS (61% US market share in Q1 2012), its users just aren’t laying out the cash as readily as iOS users.

It’s an unfortunate situation, but I don’t see it changing any time soon. Sucks for me, since I’ll NEVER own an Apple device, and am quite fond of Android. Well, okay, it doesn’t actually suck for me since I hate phone games, but in THEORY it would suck for me…

FitzpatrickPhillips

Ah, very informative. Thanks!

I figured it was something along those lines. Whenever apps update for android, there’s always a flood of complains about crashing on specific types of Android devices and such.

OneOkami

Following up on what Locklear said about profitability, I’ve read multiple studies that say iOS users buy more games and pay more for them.

And Android really is a huge mess when when it comes to OS fragmentation. There are so many Android phones out there running so many different flavors of the OS that it can be a nightmare trying to support them all (this is in addition to having to worry about the different capabilities of the hardware).
The carriers can dictate which phone gets Android updates and the reality is many of them get pruned off OS updates before long. My last Android phone (which I was actively using less than a year ago and was less than two years old) was cut off at Android 2.3, this was when Ice Cream Sandwich was getting ready to hit (4.0)

EDIT: One last thing in response to the “every and their mothers having an apple device”. The reality is the Android market is actually larger than the iOS market. Google claimed that title a while ago ;)